Tip of the Day

Using the Digital Crown to peek at your Apple Watch screen

Along with major enhancements like built-in GPS and swim workouts, the Apple Watch Series 2 includes another unique new feature which allows you to gradually wake the screen using the Digital Crown — essentially letting you sort of “peek” at it. The setting to enable this can be found under General, Wake Screen in the Apple Watch app on your iPhone, although oddly it’s not present in the corresponding section in the watchOS Settings app — you have to enable it from your iPhone.

With this option enabled, turning the Digital Crown upward when your Apple Watch is asleep will gradually illuminate the screen while keeping its brightness low — useful for glancing at your Watch in low light conditions, such as in a movie theater. Turning the Digital Crown back the other way will put the screen back to sleep, provided you haven’t reached peak brightness. This feature also still works with the Time Travel feature — if Time Travel is enabled on your Apple Watch, you’ll still be able to use it if you wake your Watch normally, or once you’ve dialed it up to peak brightness with the Digital Crown.

Comments

I've wondered that myself. Assuming that there's a technical reason for it at all, my best guess is that it has to do with the differences in available screen brightness.... The Series 2 gets considerably brighter, so perhaps it wasn't possible to make the gradual "dialing up" of the brightness work properly on the other models — or at least work well enough that it made a difference from simply tapping on the screen.

Posted by Jesse Hollington on 2017-01-18 14:29:15

Is there any reason that this couldn't have been included on the Series 1?